Kerbal Space Program Docking Tutorial / Guide

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Here's the most useful Kerbal Space Program tutorial and guide I've found so far. For the longest time, I could not for the life of me figure out how to dock in this game, because every tutorial confused me. But this video explains it very well, and I finally got it! It's actually a lot more simple than I originally thought, so don't give up. Once you do it once, you won't have a tough time doing it again.

KSP Docking tips

When building a docking system, make sure all space craft have enough RCS (monoprop) fuel. You may spend a lot of time trying to dock, and nothing is more frustrating than running out of monoprop when you are less than 1000 km away from your docking target.

Make sure your inclination is the same as your target, this will make docking and the rendezvous much easier. Use the ascending and descending nodes to change your inclination in relation to the target.

The biggest tip I can give you for understanding how to dock in Kerbal Space Program is once you get within 5000km of your docking target (make sure you have your target selected), try to push the (X) on your navball to the pink target until your relative speed to the target is 5 m/s or lower. At this point you can switch off your engines and use your RCS thrusters to slowly dock with the target. For RCS, use your H key to move forward, N to move backward, J is left, L is right, I is down and K is up.

If you need more help, try downloading MechJeb or Kerbal Engineer. They have useful stats for docking and MechJeb even has a rendezvous module which will help greatly with getting close to the target that you want to dock with.

If you have any questions, comments or your own docking hints, tips and tricks for Kerbal Space Program, please post them in the comments section below. Thanks for visiting and for your contributions. I am willing to answer any questions you may have as I know docking can be the hardest part of this game.